The Friar now pushed back his table an inch or two with both hands and jerked back his chair a little. It had suddenly occurred to him that this was certainly the day, and probably the hour too, for the return of his faithful servant whom everybody called “Miles”, or just simply “Master Soldier”, from an important errand. He had sent him to meet someone on board a ship arriving at the London docks who had been a pupil of the great student of magnetism, Master Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt in Picardy, for he was very anxious to learn if Master Peter had ever, among his many experiments, invented anything in the least resembling a mechanical Head capable of uttering oracles. Roger knew that the pupils of this Petrus Peregrinus were generally as reticent as to what they had learnt from him, as the man himself, save to a very few, was reticent about what he taught; but the Friar hoped the astute Miles would have been able to get from this particular voyager the information he so greatly desired.
Smoothing out a couple of little wrinkly excrescences from the manuscript before him, Roger Bacon now leant back in his chair and contemplated the curtained alcove near his bed where stood his now almost finished Brazen Head, the boldest as well as the most intricate of all his world-changing inventions.
“What it now needs,” he told himself, “is something—something I mean in my own peculiar way of thinking—to play the part for it that the priests assure us is played for us in Baptism. And, I know very well the kind of Baptism that my Head wants. O I know so well!”
And lifting one of his hands from the manuscript before him he rubbed the back of his knuckles against his forehead. “What it wants is the inspiration of Virginity. The best Baptism of all for it would be from an old maid, for old maids—O and don’t I know it!—are the ones who have the Secret. For who in Iscalis taught me the rudiments of Latin, and more than the rudiments of the Lingua Franca, but great-aunt Katharina? And who but Aunt Katharina collected for me what scraps of learning came blowing across the roofs of Iscalis and whirling like drifting leaves through its market-place? One day when they elect a Pope again as interested in learning as Fulcode was, I must write a treatise on all the prophetesses and oracular teachers in human history from the beginning of the world, who have been old maids. I begin to think there is something in the loss of virginity, especially when followed by pregnancy, that destroys the power in a woman to become a medium for that ‘Secretum Secretorum’, that ‘Secret of Secrets’, through which the ultimate Mystery of Life is revealed.”
At this point in his exciting thoughts Friar Bacon rose from his seat at the table and began walking up and down that small room. Any intelligent onlooker peering in upon him through some crack in that chamber’s wall would have noted that the excitement within him was not worrying him or troubling him or making him anxious or distressed. It was filling him with elation.
At last he stopped before the black curtain that concealed this thing of brass which he had created out of nothing. “O Head of all my Labour,” he cried in his heart with a sudden desperate outburst of long-suppressed feeling. “O child of the essence as well as of the being of my deepest soul! O thou only son of both the energies of my soul! If only I could baptize thee with the living spirit of a true Virgin, whether she were an old maid or a young maid, I would be content!”
Suddenly there arose a most extraordinary sound from behind the black curtain which covered that alcove near the head of his bed. “It’s beginning! It’s beginning!” cried the especial self within the Friar that he was so anxious to establish once for all as a soul much more complicated than any of his contemporaries could imagine. And it certainly would have seemed, to any invisible reader of human thoughts, that mingled with this exultation there was a throb of something very like pure unmitigated terror.
“Have I, plain man as I am,” the Friar evidently couldn’t help thinking, “just by my obstinate perseverance in dissecting, as they say Democritus did, every nerve and sinew and fibre in the skulls of the dead, actually played the part, without knowing it, of God? Have I actually created a rational soul, above and beyond those others that are engendered out of the substance of Matter? Have I flung this new soul into the machinery of my entirely artificial and purely material Head of Brass, so that it has come to life? Have I created an angelic superhuman creature, to be my living oracle for the rest of my days?”
He listened intently for any recurrence of the strange sound he had heard. Was this newly-created Being, he asked himself, going through a period parallel to human babyhood? Was it even now uttering unintelligible and inarticulate babblings?
Yes! By God and Christ! There was that sound again! “I must take a look at it!” And although he caught himself in an actual shiver of fear, he rushed to the alcove and pulled the curtain aside! The Brazen Image regarded him with a cold, callous, indifferent, non-human stare. It was a figure constructed to be about the height of a man, but it looked larger than human owing to the fact that it was without legs or arms. It was in fact what in ancient Greek cities used to be called a “Herm”—that is to say, a four-square milestone or miniature obelisk, like the formal pedestal of a classic bust, the bust of an emperor if it were Roman, and of a philosopher if it were Greek.
In the case of this angelic or demonic creation of his, the Brazen Head itself, whose massive base was of marble, rose from this short column as a head might rise from a square neck on narrow shoulders and, as their eyes met, the Head’s creator fancied he heard his creation mutter these queer Latin-sounding words: “Birginis, Sirginis, Flirginis, Virginis.”
Roger Bacon behaved now as if he were indeed so excited by the result of his creative power that he felt an emotion filling him at one and the same moment with joy and fear. Hurriedly he pulled back the black curtain over the Brazen Head. And it was then that any crafty spy peering in at him—not from the window where the sweet-scented twilight hovered over the tops of the forest-trees and through which a lovely air was blowing, but through a crack in one of the other three walls—would have heard him give an exultant little cry: “By Christ, I’d forgotten! Didn’t a voice wake me in the night with the word ‘ghosta’?”
And then such a spy would have seen him rush with the excitement of a boy in his teens to a small square of wood set among the bare boards of that attic-chamber and marked with the letter “A”. This piece of wood the excited Friar extracted neatly from its fixed position, using his nails to achieve this result, and bending down above the orifice, stared at a vellum-covered volume that lay hidden there, on the outside of which was written in bold purple letters the words Fons Vitae Avicebron, “You are my master and teacher.” He thought as he stared at these words, “You, you, you, more than anyone else in the world!”
And as he bent and stared at that title Fons Vitae and at that name Avicebron, he made one of the greatest efforts he had ever made in his life to visualize, as if they really could be apprehended by our ordinary senses, that plurality of separate souls within us, of which he had finally decided that what we generally call, and feel too often enough, to be our normal human soul, actually is composed.
Intensely he struggled, as he stared at the name of his admired Jewish thinker, actually to visualize the primal elements in these souls of ours that he had come to the conclusion arise automatically within the body by the potentiality of matter itself and have no connection with the rational soul which is created directly, immediately, and instantaneously, by God Himself, and created ready and prepared to be joined with the body, as soon as the infant, already possessed of the primal elements of its soul, is born into this world.
At this moment as he stared at that square hole in the floor, at the title Fons Vitae, only just visible in the growing twilight, and at the name Avicebron, whose darkened letters he had to supply from his own head, he saw the first evolution of the primal soul within the womb as a wave of incurving, ingathering, insatiable water, desperately craving nourishment and rushing furiously through the solidest as well as through the softest substances, and possessed of the sw
allowing mouth of a hungry fish. And he saw the second evolution of this same primal soul as a wave of quivering vapour, rushing also through everything, but endowing the matter out of which it springs, the matter that is from the start able to engender it, with all the reactions of our human senses.
And at that intense moment he actually saw the rational soul which he had admitted must be directly created by God, saw it as a flame of something more than ordinary fire, saw it indeed as a flame created in the shape of a man-god, a flame that could wholly possess the body and yet according to its own will and pleasure could reach out from the body to which it has been joined and inspire other bodies.
“O, if I could only decide,” the Friar cried in his excited heart, “what to think about the embryo of an infant, within a pregnant mother, before it is born into this world at all and before it is given its God-created rational soul! O I must think and think how you, our Jewish Master of all Masters, would have dealt with this problem of the embryo had you been called upon to consider it!”
With this question in his mind Roger Bacon bent down and replaced the square piece of wood and rose to his full height. “A Jewish Maid,” he thought triumphantly, “after a Jewish Sage! That’s the way I’ll give new life to the Brazen one! Yes! you’ve been yourself a ghost for years, Avicebron, and it was your teaching about the pluralism of the soul that set me thinking first—just why I have no notion: it is all a mystery—of creating our Brazen one, even as God creates the rational soul within us! And now that I’ve looked at your book I know that it was you who put it into my mind in the night to cry out the name Ghosta!”
Friar Bacon now went back happily and quietly to his chair and table and to that piece of foolscap parchment half-covered with his quite legible but by no means very elegant handwriting. But he soon had to put down his pen again, for he was interrupted by the familiar sound, not of any Master Miles returning from London, but of the heavy steps of lay-brother Tuck, ascending the narrow turret-stairs to his low-roofed chamber, bringing him his supper.
It was a beautifully tranquil and by no means a very cold twilight that had by this time diffused itself over all the western provinces of our Island, and pleasant pine-wood scents mingled with the nutty waftures from the well-spiced apple-pasty that Brother Tuck, the moment he entered, carefully set down in the middle of the empty square space on the table from which Roger Bacon had hurriedly cleared all his papers.
In the depths of his pluralistic soul the Friar was now repeating over and over to himself the name “Ghosta”, but he said, “Sit down, Brother,” in the particular tone of a person who murmurs almost mechanically, “And now we come back to real life.”
And when Brother Tuck had jerked into position a chair of the same shape as the one occupied by the Friar and containing a cushion of identically the same colour and size, the latter added the words: “And you might, if you don’t mind, get the bottle and glasses”; a suggestion that was taken with the quickest alacrity. From a small shelf in an open recess near the door was extracted a beautifully heavy and almost opaque cut-glass container half-full of the reddest Burgundian wine from which, when it stood between them on the table, the Brother filled both their glasses.
Then followed, but with the same matter-of-fact, mechanical inevitability, a very curious gesture, traditional in Bumset Priory—a gesture that Raymond de Laon was wont to declare he had heard from none other than the Papal Legate to this country who subsequently became Clement IV, was prehistoric and pre-Christian, and went back to the days of Homer and Hesiod, when, before touching any wine, you had to sprinkle drops of it on the ground and on the air. What in fact both the men did now was to dip their longest finger into their glass and lightly flip a few drops of the wine they were about to drink towards each other.
“Here’s news for you, my friend and God’s friend,” Brother Tuck began. “The Mother Superior next door, you know, has now got a really extraordinary Jewish girl to help the old nun who cooks for them. That poor old bitch—if you’ll excuse me, sir—has never had time enough to cook properly; to cook, I mean, things that she herself enjoys. She spends half her time carrying dishes around to sick nuns. But now, with this new girl there, things are going, Prior Bog assures me, so marvellously well that Sister Mandrake, the nun who cooks for them, is happy again, and poor old Serga Kathalorum has found time to look round her a bit and enjoy life a little—found time to feel that being a Mother Superior isn’t quite the worst fate that could have befallen a god-fearing elderly respectable lady. Pardon me, Master Friar, but has any new devil entered your mind, like that one that made you say, ‘Time is Past’ over and over, just as if it were ‘et cum Spiritum tuum’?”
Brother Tuck emptied his glass, holding it to his lips in order that its last drops—drops that were no doubt called “the dregs” in countries where certain accumulations of strongly-smelling residue could always be drained from the bottom of wine-glasses—and then, having allowed his uplifted eye-balls—and while he did this his expression resembled that of a frog, with its chin on a lily-leaf, searching the empyrean for thunder—to scour the discoloured interior of the glass he was holding, he repeated “cum Spiritum tuum” in a dying fall of unction that resolved itself, ere it passed wholly away, into a diffused question.
VII
THE INVOCATION
Brother Tuck was still gazing with an uneasy relaxed interrogatory stare into the abstracted eyes before him, and across the empty glass and the full glass, when to his startled and rather shocked surprise he saw the Friar rise slowly to his feet.
“Please answer me, Brother Tuck, my old friend,” said the risen man gravely. “No! Stay as you are. Don’t get up. Here, drink my glass. I can have another later. But it’s necessary for me to ask you rather an important question. What’s this new girl’s name? I mean this one you’re talking about, who is such a help to Serga Kathalorum at the Convent, and to the old nun—Sister Mandrake they call her, don’t they?—who does their cooking?
“No, don’t get up, old friend. Stay where you are. It’s for the person who is asking the questions to stand. But it’s important to me and important purely for myself. Yes, you must understand that, Brother Tuck. You mustn’t think I am asking you for any reason except a special peculiar, and quite definite one of my own. But to me this matter is of extreme importance; for it has to do with the particular thing I’m working on just now, namely—though I don’t want to bother you, old friend, with these peculiarly difficult matters—the question as to how far at any definite point in the passing of time—you can see roughly, old friend, can’t you, what I’m talking about?—our natural human apparatus for looking ahead can be used for purposes of prediction and how far it must hopelessly collapse; and why I asked you about this person, Tuck, my friend, was because——”
At this moment not only did a sudden gust of wind from the north cause the wooden framework of the small window to shake, but an agitated yellowhammer, with wings and feathers ruffled and with nerves and brain confused and befuddled to such a degree by an airy panic emanating from a whirling flock of frightened starlings, that everything in the world except that little, low-roofed philosophic chamber seemed all beak and claws, burst into the room, and aware of Brother Tuck’s square shoulders stooping over two glasses and Friar Bacon’s bottle-neck shoulders erect over nothing, flung itself in a wild panic against the three walls in front of it, and fell dead on the floor before reverting to the fourth.
Both men went to pick up the bird, and there was something almost like a boyish scuffle between them as to which should reach it first. In the event, attained in two seconds, it was Friar Bacon who got the motionless creature into his hands and smoothed down its feathers and let its head fall limp across his thumb.
“Well! tell me now, Tuck, old friend; has this new girl at the convent got a name that suggests death or anything to do with death?” As he spoke the Friar lifted the bird’s head from the back of his thumb just about an eighth of an inch and then let
it sink down again. “Anything to do with Death, old friend, that’s the question. And when you’ve answered I’ll tell you exactly why I put this question to you. But sit down again, and I’ll sit down too. It’s queer, isn’t it, how much more tiring it is to stand than to walk?”
Both the men were silent, looking at each other across the table, the Friar mechanically caressing the dead bird on his lap and the Lay-Brother mechanically running his finger round the edge of the wine-glass that was nearest to him. If only one among Friar Bacon’s unrealized inventions had been present then that had the power, the moment you touched a particular knob, of uttering in a strong firm voice the thoughts of each person in turn, towards whose cranium, whether hairy or bald, the spear-point of its machinery had been directed, what a moment this would have been for a perfect proof as to how the most unorthodox, improper, shameless, outrageous thoughts flit through the heads of upright, honest, and thoroughly good men busy with entirely blameless activities!
For Brother Tuck wondered how soon Prior Bog would detect something amiss if he, Tuck of Abbotsbury, fried his own excrement for the Priory supper; and Roger of Ilchester wondered whether it would be possible for a female yellow-hammer to lay eggs if she were impregnated by a dead mate who had been galvanized into momentary sexual excitement by a thunderstorm.
“Please tell me, Tuck,” enquired Bacon earnestly, “whether any idea, even the very remotest idea of Death entered the mind of the baptizer when he was baptizing this new girl at work in the convent?”
The Brazen Head Page 9
